Dogperson39, Sarah Benslimane, Sylvie Fleury, Charlotte Kingsnorth, Caitlin MacQueen: Lumps and Bumps

A hand sheathed in a white cotton glove gently

bends a peach-coloured-silicone toe back-and-forth.

Three women locked inside a shiny marble room lift

their red dresses and slap their round pink bellies

before scooping them up into magical tummy control

pants. A beautiful AI-generated brunette who some-

times has freckles, and sometimes has green eyes,

or brown, or blue is interviewed on television about

her role in a forthcoming film and suddenly starts

speaking in a different language. How do we repre-

sent – and comprehend – the body in an age that has

snubbed its own materiality?

Each of the five artists in Lumps and Bumps nego-

tiates categorisation and perception, the flesh and

the eye. Sylvie Fleury presents here an amorphous

glowing sculpture. Look at it for longer than you

might usually, and its mounds begin to shift. It is

Venus De Milo left to rot on Neptune, her shoulders

and breasts collapsing into soft crepuscular humps.

Extraterrestrial in its seductive, silken blue chrome,

it presents a disruption of the conventionally desirable

female silhouette, with the added allure of body-

horror. Is this a foreign object, a being, or is it a pool of

unregulated flesh, breaking free from its shapewear?

Within the walls of the gallery, the body – your body

– is echoed in puckered metallic surface, foamyleather and pixelated wool by artists that play with

the anxieties of classification between art, object,

furniture. Such taxonomies interest Sarah Benslimane

whose practice considers how information circulates

freely like poetic trash. Her wall-based, three-

dimensional assemblages, made with found objects

and using industrial materials, consciously trick the

viewer’s expectations of our digital reality. Her grid

of highly reflective, pillow-like metal panels blurs

distinctions as we become momentarily trapped

inside our dappled reflection. Benslimane’s surface

only promises comfort.

Fashion constantly urges the body to conform. The

obedience of flesh coloured athleisure, of skin surgi-

cally stripped and pinned, of online twin selves with

pores crafted by pixels, is all wrapped up in Charlotte

Kingsnorth’s leather marshmallow bench. Like Fleury,

Kingsnorth takes a seductive material or colour into

a direction that unnerves. Assembling discarded

chairs, carved logs and thick nubby textiles she offers

echoes of a body that is mostly, maybe, human but

maybe not. Her works have the suggestion of soft

toys that have mutated into a nymphic near-future.

If Kingsnorth’s pale leather and padding suggest

ease, then Dogperson39’s flat rug is the antithesis.

The artist maintains a high level of anonymity, their

identity managed and mediated through digital

aliases. They are, in a sense, unbodied; an ethereal

presence sheltered from public consumption.

Dogperson39’s enormous floor work provides the

gallery with a supple, direct portal to hell. Using

unruly structure, shape and softness, the artist makes

a demand for a body that is incorporeal and disguised.

All of the works in Lumps and Bumps contain a ten-

derness or abundance within them that remains off

limits. This containment – of a body or a form within

a space – fizzes in Caitlin MacQueen’s hallucinatory

painting of a nightclub populated by people caught

between dancing, watching, and moving through

each another. Her challenge is to make something

from blurry old footage or photographs. She is, like

all of us, a body in the world, seeing and observing

and misremembering. In her bygone mis-én-scene,

figures search for stability within the social space of

the club without the supervision of the smartphone.

In a powdery setting made up of layers and layers

of thin paint that need to be, she says, “felt with the

eyes,” we sense the obfuscation of humanness.